1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to enabling capability-based participation by two or more participants.
2. Background and Description of the Related Art
Interactions between remote participants can take many forms. It can be a planning meeting, a seminar, a classroom, or thousands of people watching a speech. In these interactions, people assume or may be assigned various roles. For instance, in a remote classroom environment, you have students, an instructor, possibly assistants to the instructor, and display of one or more multimedia presentations.
Interactions may be through multiple channels; a webinar, phone line, and TTY, but each would be limited to the set of capabilities associated with that channel and all users in that channel would be limited to those capabilities. For instance, all persons logged in through the web would be assumed to have the same capabilities.
In each of these roles, there may be different kinds of actions one can perform on people or objects in other roles. An instructor can start a public discussion with a selected student or group of students. A participant, not to disturb the rest of the class, could have a private conversation with another participant. A participant may wish to focus his attention on a multimedia presentation and not watch the presenter, or vice versa. The other streams will continue unabated, making this challenging for the participant to filter out these other distractions.
Multimedia presentations can be delivered to large groups of people for viewing and interaction using a variety of devices such as computers, cell phones, and PDA's. These devices, which we will collectively refer to as client devices, enable one or more persons to interact with various portions of the screen in a fixed manner. Such conferencing or other interactive software enable persons to receive fixed views of persons such that either the size of the entire display can be modified, or one can make portions larger or smaller. Doing the latter would cause the partial obliteration of the other portions of the display rather than resizing to fit.
Remote presentations impliedly create two roles; the presenter and the viewer. The presenter owns one or more windows associated. The presenter may temporarily or permanently promote one of the viewers to be the presenter.